


Watch Me

by ameliacareful



Series: Strangers and Brothers [8]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s01e12 Faith, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-13
Updated: 2016-09-13
Packaged: 2018-08-14 19:44:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8026582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ameliacareful/pseuds/ameliacareful
Summary: When Dean was 14, he argued with John and John threw him out. At 26, a firefighter, he accidentally reconnected with Sam and went back to hunting.  Sam does not want him to go back to hunting but Dean finds himself drawn to the life.





	Watch Me

            Dean was afraid of dying. Not of being dead per se, but as he expected, dying was awful. Not particularly surprised that he was dying young. As soon as he had gone back to hunting he had figured he would. He felt stupid though, Rawheads were easy. He understood about electricity back when he was still in school, one of the first calls he’d ever gone out on had been a guy who worked for the utility company who had managed to hit a trunk line with a shovel. He’d just joined the local volunteers and when they got there, wasn’t much but a charred corpse. Very dead. The fire chief had looked at him and said, “Usually we ask the new guy to do mouth to mouth but this time we’ll let it ride.” Fire station humor.

            So standing in water and firing a taser? Stupid. Embarrassingly so.

            Dying sucked because it felt terrible. He ached and if he did anything he couldn’t breath. He got chest pains at the slightest provocation. Chest pains were scary only because he thought every time that his heart was going to rupture. He felt…fragile. People acted weird around him. Super nice in a way that said over and over, ‘You’re dying, dude.’ Everything was out of his control. He wished it had just happened rather than this two weeks to a month shit.

            Dying. Fuck.

            He knew the moment Sam found out. He’d understood enough of what the doctors were saying to ask the right questions. He had thought about it and then turned the TV on to have something to do other than think about it (not successful) then Sam came in, all intense. Sam had been back to silent running since the asylum thing; not talking much, distant. Dean had wavered between thinking since he’d shot Sam in the chest with rock salt it was only fair, and wanting to punch him.

            Didn’t matter now. He was so tired he didn’t care. He just hoped Sam didn’t want to have some sort of heavy conversation. He tried to pretend he had actually been paying attention to the television. “Have you ever actually watched daytime TV?” he said and crap if he didn’t sound weak as shit. “It's terrible.”

            “I talked to your doctor.” Sam wasn’t wearing sunglasses but he might as well have been.

            Fine. “That fabric softener teddy bear. Oh, I'm gonna hunt that little bitch down.”

            “Dean,” Sam said. It was clear Sam Wanted To Say Something.

            So Dean clicked the TV off. “Yeah. All right, well, looks like you're gonna leave town without me.” Let Sam go track down the thing that killed Jess. He was sorry he couldn’t help but honestly it was hard to work up the energy to feel—

            “What are you talking about?” Sam said, losing the whole Terminator. “I'm not gonna leave you here.”

            “Hey, you better take care of that car. Or, I swear, I'll haunt your ass.”

            Total failure to lighten the tone. Sam looked pissed. “I don't think that's funny.”

            “Oh, come on, it's a little funny.” Rattling Sam’s cage was clearly going to be one of Dean’s last pleasures in life.

            Sam looked down at the stupid hospital blanket, one of those cheap weave things. He blinked a couple of times. Wait. The big guy was wet around the eyes. Oh God, no. No no no no. Dean did not need that. Could not handle that.

            “Look, Sammy,” Dean said, talking, anything to keep whatever might be happening from happening. “What can I say, man, it's a dangerous gig. I drew the short straw. That's it, end of story.”

            “Don't talk like that, all right?” Sam growled. “We still have options.”

            “What options? Yeah, burial or cremation.” As soon as he said it Dean thought his mouth was going to get him in trouble one of these days. (But not, because, dying!) He eased it a little. “And I know it's not easy. But I'm gonna die. And you can't stop it.”

            Six feet four is really tall when it’s looking down on you. Especially when it stops being all emotional and goes hard.

            “Watch me,” Sam said.

#

            He couldn’t stay in the hospital because people died in hospitals and it had to be full of ghosts. (Not. People haunted the places they lived. But knowing that and believing it were two different things.) Sam would have kicked his ass when he showed up at the hotel but you can get away with about anything when you’re dying. Except not taking your meds. Or drinking beer. Or eating anything with salt in it.

            “Who cares?” Dean asked. “If I want to eat burgers for the last month of my life… I’m going to eat burgers.”

            Sam ignored him. Dean stared at his swollen ankles, elevated on Sam’s pillows.

            “Your pillows are going to smell like my… feet,” he said It was hard to give Sam grief when he kept running out of breath before the before the end of a sentence. Sam had called hospice and gotten him a little oxygen thing on wheels and a bigger tank that stayed in their hotel room. It helped.

            Dean wasn’t sure what the little one was for since Sam never let him go anywhere.

            Not, if he were willing to admit it, that he cared. He was so tired.

            “Hey, Caleb,” Sam said into the phone. “It’s Sam Winchester. Yeah. You heard right, I am hunting with my brother again… no I haven’t seen John. Fucker’s off the map again but if he calls you, tell him to give me a call.” Sam sounded like he was talking shop, not like John was his father who wasn’t returning his calls about Dean. “No, don’t need guns at the moment. I’m trying to track down leads on spells or healers. Yeah. Any kind, really.”

            Dean coughed. He could never get his throat clear. He was always thirsty but he wasn’t allowed to drink very much because he retained fluid.

            Dying sucked. He wished it was over both for him and for Sam.

            Sam got up, still listening to Caleb, scooped Dean’s plastic cup up off his bedside table, and got him his ration of ice chips out of the little freezer in the refrigerator unit in their hotel room. “Hold on a minute, Caleb.” He put the phone on mute. The chips had frozen in a mass so Sam put them in a dishrag and slammed them against the top of the freezer to fragment them. He took the phone off mute and tucked it between his shoulder and his ear. “Sorry.” He poured the chips into the cup and put it next to Dean. He touched Dean on the shoulder, all without looking at him, and sat down again at his computer. “Okay. Thanks. Tell me if you hear anything.”

            So tired.

            Sam tried the next number in Dad’s journal.

#

            The faith healer thing was out of nowhere although Dean felt he fit right in, wheeling his little oxygen tank into the tent. He was getting worse he knew. His lips and the tips of his fingers were blue-ish from the failure of his heart to keep up with his body’s need for oxygen. He couldn’t concentrate half the time. Sam didn’t argue anymore. He just hauled Dean up out of the car. Pride made Dean shake Sam off.

            Then the second time the blind preacher picked him. He was and he wasn’t surprised. Death had been riding him. He’d been sure he was going to die. Still, despite being convinced, being tired and—truthfully, terrified underneath it all—he realized the moment the preacher touched him that he hadn’t believed he was going to die. When he took his first real deep breath in a couple of weeks and his heart muscle took his blood and slammed it through his body, red and full of life and he felt everything come back, when he felt good and found his brother’s eyes meeting his.

            For a moment he didn’t know what was in Sam’s face. Something like iron. Something _getting a job done_.

            Then Sam was running to him, arms out to catch him as he went to his knees. Sam gripped him, those big hands on his arms. “Dean! Say something!”

            Roy Le Grange was above him, hands out in benediction and behind him was a white-haired thing in a suit. It met his eyes for a moment, almost the way Sam had, and then turned and vanished.

            He realized several things at once. That he was okay.

            That this was not what it seemed.

            That Sam was not exactly what he thought.

#

            They did what they always did. They worked the case.  Reapers. The Preacher's wife. A girl dying of cancer. Dean didn't want her to die.

            All through the case something was different.  Sam looking at him, waiting for what he would say, what he'd decide.  "What?" he said once.

            "You saw the reaper, not me," was all Sam said but it was different.  When the reaper touched him the second time, when he felt his heart begin to stop he believed it that time, really believed he was going to die and was afraid for himself and afraid for Sam.  This will kill Sam, too, he thought. 

            For the second time the reaper turned from him and vanished.  Roy Le Grange's wife died.  

            A girl dying of cancer wasn't cured.

            "Sam," Dean asked, when his brother came out of the dark to find him. "We did the right thing here, didn't we?"

            "We did," Sam said gently.  "We have to go."

#

            Dean drove the Impala out of town, leaving the stupid little oxygen tank on wheels. They drove for a couple of hours, got food in a drive through and stopped for gas.

            Sam saw a park, the kind for families and softball. There was a the cooler, and ice, and beer they got when they stopped for gas. Sam chunked it on the picnic table and handed Dean a beer. Dean opened it with his ring, handed it back to Sam, pulled one for himself. The park was quiet. Beyond the picnic table and a couple of trees was a baseball diamond, dark now. Sam stepped onto the bench and then on to the picnic table, tall and narrow above until his shoulders flared out under his hoodie. He took a drink of his beer.

            “You’re in it now,” he said above, his back to Dean.

            “Of course I’m in it!” Dean said. 

            “You’re fucking made for hunting,” Sam said. “Way more than I am.”

            “You know everything there is to know about what’s out there, probably more than Dad.” The beer was bitter and cold. Nothing tasted better than the first, gulps when he was thirsty and sober and the beer hadn’t had a chance to start to get warm. “You’ve been doing this since you were nine. You just saved my life. Who the hell else could do that?”

            “You can already out shoot me,” Sam said. Silhouetted as he was against stars, Dean could see he was looking down. “I can do strategy, but you can think on your feet. I can research, but you—you were always good at it. Like Dad. It’s gonna eat you alive, Dean.”

            Dean snorted. Here it came.

            “You think I don’t know what I’m like?” Sam said softly. Which was not what Dean expected. “The weird shit? I mean, yeah, some of the time I was trying to get you fed up, trying to get you to go back to your girl and your job. And yeah, some of it was… when Jessica died, she kept trying to get me to… she thought I was just some guy from the wrong side of the tracks. Some smart poor kid and if I would just settle down and get a job it would all be fine, and sometimes I believed her, you know? As long as you were living like that I could believe that maybe I could. But part of me thought that if you were okay, one of us had to stay with Dad. Keep the cosmic balance or something.” Sam laughed quietly in the dark. “Anyway, Jess is dead. You’re here. That’s all gone.”

            “You could quit,” Dean said. He wasn’t sure he believed it.

            “So the drinking and the pills and the weird food stuff. All the PTSD shit. That’s me a twenty-two. You're already changing. You're harder. Angrier than you were when you first came with me. It's getting to you. What are we going to be like at thirty? If we live to thirty? Which frankly, I don’t really intend on doing, you know?”

            “Sam?” Dean said.

            “Look, you were just ready to die at twenty-six,” Sam said.

            “I wasn’t committing suicide,” Dean said.

            Sam stepped onto the bench and then sat down next to Dean, knocking knee to knee. “I don’t really feel like I deserve to get to hunt with you but if you insist, it’s not my fault.” His teeth glimmered in the darkness. He sounded genuinely happy.

            Dean felt in over his head. “Are you…suicidal?”

            “Every hunter is suicidal,” Sam said. He fished in the cooler. “You, me, John. I’m going to do my best to keep you alive, though. Open me another beer, would you?”

            Dean tried to think of what to say to that.  Everything in his head just sounded angry.  He opened Sam another beer.

 

Fin

           

           

 


End file.
